• Bahrain Grand Prix - FP2

Grosjean happier with new chassis

Romain Grosjean: "We're getting there and it's been a positive day" © Sutton Images

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• Report:
• Raikkonen shows Lotus pace in FP2
  

• Race:
• Bahrain Grand Prix

• Drivers:
• Romain Grosjean

• Teams:
• Lotus F1

Romain Grosjean is optimistic of a strong showing in qualifying for the Bahrain Grand Prix after a positive start with a new chassis.

Lotus brought a new chassis to Sakhir in an attempt to solve Grosjean's recent set-up struggles, and he duly ended Friday practice within half the second of the fastest time set by team-mate Kimi Raikkonen. Grosjean said he was pleased with the progress the chassis had allowed him to make and would use Raikkonen's performance as a target on Saturday.

"The new chassis feels good," Grosjean said. "Today we've been working on getting the right correlation between chassis, setup and tyres to extract everything we want from it. It's easy to know what you want, the difficult bit is getting the little details sorted, but we're getting there and it's been a positive day. We've seen that Kimi was fastest today so that gives us a great target for tomorrow."

Trackside operations director Alan Permane was encouraged by the smooth running both Lotus drivers enjoyed on Friday.

"It was a fairly standard Friday for us, which is a nice way to start the weekend," Permane said. "We looked at setup work in the morning before moving to longer runs, higher fuel race pace and degradation analysis on both tyre compounds in the afternoon, with no problems or interruptions to the programme. We were able to push both allocated compounds of tyres pretty well in the hot conditions today and generally the cars are well balanced. Romain's running a new chassis and overall is happy with the car so we're looking forward to an exciting qualifying session tomorrow."

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